It’s the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that picked up a story that someone might have found El dorado an hidden paradise. They also claim that it is an ancient city that was discovered on google maps. But if they would have read the original article in The Online times they would have found the following quote:

Hemming says that while the paper in Antiquity is “significant work by serious people … none of this has anything remotely to do with El Dorado or that racist, incompetent nutter Percy Fawcett. It’s as though someone tried to link a discovery at Stonehenge with, say, Edward Lear’s travels in the Balkans”.

They would also have found that the original paper was published in 2003 by Martti Parssinen and Alceu Ranzi. If they would have tried a little bit they would have found their report in Antiquity. There you can see that they totally missed the whole thing. The sites was discovered by airplane. The news in the report is that they discovered some earthworks (Ditches and soil hedges!) in an area they did not expect to find them. And it is not a city, it is earthworks. The authors speculate that the earthworks might have been for defense, ceremonies or for storing live aquatic food. Far from a city…

So why did this pop up now? Could it be due to David Grann mentioned in the article? Well at first it seems like that. He has written a book called “﻿﻿Lost city of Z” that was published in 2009 and is now being prepared for a movie. But i found a more plausible reason on amazon, the store not the rainforest… His book is being released as a pocket on January the 25th..

Good work David Grann, you got yourself some nice pr for the release of your book.